1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to online search engines.
2. Background Art
A search engine is an information retrieval system used to locate documents and other information stored on a computer system. Search engines are useful at reducing an amount of time required to find information. One well known type of search engine is a Web search engine which searches for documents, such as web pages, on the “World Wide Web.” Examples of such search engines include Yahoo! Search™ (at http://www.yahoo.com), Bing™ (at http://www.bing.com), and Google™ (at http://www.google.com). Online services such as LexisNexis™ and Westlaw™ also enable users to search for documents provided by their respective services, including articles and court opinions. Further types of search engines include personal search engines, mobile search engines, and enterprise search engines that search on intranets, among others.
To perform a search, a user of a search engine supplies a query to the search engine. The query contains one or more words/terms, such as “hazardous waste” or “country music.” The terms of the query are typically selected by the user to as an attempt find particular information of interest to the user. The search engine returns a list of documents relevant to the query. In a Web-based search, the search engine typically returns a list of uniform resource locator (URL) addresses for the relevant documents, which is displayed to the user in a search results page. If the scope of the search resulting from a query is large, the returned list of documents may include thousands or even millions of documents.
Many publishers that operate websites accessible on the Internet have an understanding of content desired by users, but do not have access to such content. For example, a publisher who is a connoisseur of vintage automobiles may desire to serve an audience that is interested in vintage automobiles. As such, the publisher may desire to obtain online content associated with vintage automobiles, and to provide such content in an up-to-date and automatic fashion. The publisher may know of other websites that contain such content and that are currently accessible by users. However, conventionally, it is a time consuming manual process for the publisher to retrieve and process that content into a form that the publisher desires for it to be shown on the publisher's website.